Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

Jason Calacanis asks the money question and Dan Bricklin provides a key portion of the answer when he says:

"With podcasts, you know that almost everybody listens from the start"

Radio and television require drive-by-attention, the random encounter of the advertisement by the viewer/listener. Advertisers play the odds that frequent placement of commercials will insure at least one contact with any given consumer. Even Web page ads suffer from this problem and simultaneously create attention overload with too much information for a viewer to absorb. With an on-demand medium like a podcast, the listener tunes in for the start of the program, giving a few seconds of full attention where an advertiser or sponsor could deliver a message before launching into the content the listener tunes in for. This is very much like the radio model of many years ago, before commercial radio decided a break every 12 minutes was a good idea. This is the point of differentiation between podcasting and other alternatives - in a podcast you have the listener's attention at the outset.